Manganese Bricks

A brick is a brick when you can hold it in one hand. It’s not a brick when you need two hands.

I’ve always loved manganese bricks.

The colour in a brick depends on the amount of iron compounds in the clay. Large quantities of iron mixed with a small quantity of magnesium will result in black bricks.

Here is a wall of them.

| Wood Marsh South Yarra, Manganese Bricks, Melbourne |

Paul Auster’s book The Music of Chance is mainly about the meaninglessness of the universe – but not the meaninglessness of laying stones.

“You put down a stone, and something happens. You put down another stone and something more happens. There’s no big mystery to it. You can see the wall going up, and after a while it starts to give you a good feelings. When you work on a wall like this, you’ve always got something to show for it.”